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Abstract

This paper presents some of the results of the author's first year of doctoral research. Despite the availability of watches, stars are
still used in some villages in northern Oman to time the allocation of water for irrigation by an age-old method of tapping
groundwater by gravity flow. It appears that the use of stars survives mainly in smaller settlements still dependent on agriculture
for livelihoods, where light pollution is less severe than in the towns, and where the community adheres to traditional practices.
Many of the stars have different names to those given in the literature on Arabic stars, and the stars used for timing water vary
somewhat from one village to another. The method of stargazing also varies among villages: in some the stars are watched rising
above the horizon and in others the time is known by the rising or setting of the star above or below a man-made marker, or on its
reaching the zenith. A number of stars are identified by their international classification, possibly for the first time.